Top Ten Tricks and Tips for New IRC Users

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is an often overlooked medium
of communication. I've been using IRC for several years
and have found it to be a great way to collaborate and
interact with other people, wherever they may be.

If you're used to traditional peer-to-peer chat systems,
you may at first feel rather daunted by the unfamiliar
look and feel of IRC. Once you're able to gloss over
this, you will start to appreciate the true power of IRC
and maybe even adopt it as your preferred chat medium.

Here is my top ten list of tips and tricks that will give you
a good start on the road to becoming an everyday IRC user.

1. Pick a good IRC client.

Because there are so many different IRC clients to
choose from, you could easily spend a whole day trying
to decide which is best. The good news is that many of
them are free or available as shareware, so there is
often no harm in trying them out.

For Windows platforms, I would recommend mIRC, while on
Linux, XChat seems to be a firm favorite.
Mac users may like to try out Snak.
If you're the kind of person who prefers to work from
a console, you can find BitchX or
irssi available for most platforms.

2. Register with NickServ.

Each IRC network can support thousands of users, but each
user must have a unique nickname. If somebody uses your
nickname while you aren't connected, you'll have no way
of getting it back until they leave.

If your favorite IRC network runs a NickServ service,
you should protect your nickname by registering it.
Freenode is one such network that runs a NickServ service.

All you have to do is connect to the IRC network and
register your current nickname by typing:

/msg NickServ register [password]

Be sure to specify a password. When you next connect to the IRC
network, you can identify yourself to NickServ by typing:

/msg NickServ identify [password]

NickServ will now recognize who you are. Once you are registered
with NickServ, you can do all sorts of other useful tasks, such
as kicking off people who have stolen your nickname. To find out
what else NickServ supports, simply type the following:

/msg NickServ help

3. Register a channel with ChanServ.

If you want to create your own channel for discussing a particular
topic, you will want to register this channel with ChanServ.
This lets you keep control over who can access the channel
and what rights other people can have on it. Simply create your
channel by joining it:

/join #MyChannel

First, make sure you are identified with NickServ; you then can proceed
with registering your channel:

/msg ChanServ register #MyChannel [password]

You are now the owner of this channel and can control every aspect
of it. For a full list of the commands supported by ChanServ, type:

/msg ChanServ help

4. Save your fingers.

There's no point typing more than you have to, and most
IRC clients will help to save your finger work when it
comes to typing in peoples' nicknames. Simply type the
first few characters of somebody's nickname and press the Tab key.
If you are using a modern IRC client, you'll see the characters
expand to the full nickname of that user. If there is more than one
nickname that starts with those characters, you will usually
be allowed to cycle through all possible choices by pressing the
Tab key repeatedly.

5. Add a useful IRC bot to your channel.

An IRC bot is a program that acts like an IRC client but
behaves totally autonomously. These are often the slaves of
the IRC world, given mundane tasks that a human would
be fed up with. One particularly useful bot is ReminderBot, which reminds people to
do things after a set time period. For example:

6. Turn your IRC channel into a group blog.

If you find an interesting web page or some such, you can
paste the URL into an IRC channel, thereby spreading the word
to all of your online friends. But why stop there? Why not run
an IRC bot that intercepts these URLs and also publishes them
on a web page? Mobibot
is an IRC bot that does just that plus a whole lot more. Mobitopia uses mobibot to capture URLs in their
IRC channel and place them on a web page at www.mobitopia.com/irc.jsp.

7. Avoid using colors and formatting.

Although most IRC clients will let you apply colors and formatting
to your messages, not many people bother with this. Some people
take a strong dislike to such extras, so as a
general rule you should avoid them unless everyone else uses them.
Be aware that some channels even ban the use of colored messages
and will prevent you from sending them.

8. Advertise your IRC channel.

If you want more people to join your newly created IRC channel,
you can advertise it on a web page by including an IRC hyperlink.
If a user has an IRC client installed, their web browser may
let them launch their IRC client automatically if they click
on an irc:// style link.

For example, if you want somebody to join your channel on the
freenode IRC network, you could include the following HTML on
the web page:

Join my channel!

9. Avoid public arguing.

Whether you're using newsgroups or IRC, arguing in public is
only going to make you look stupid. If you have a gripe with
somebody on a newsgroup, the sensible thing to do is to take
it to email. With IRC, rather than arguing your point with an
individual on a public IRC channel, you can take it to private
messages. This relieves everyone else from your arguing, and
that can only be a good thing. You can send a private message
like so:

/msg Dave You can't be serious

This message will be sent only to Dave.

10. Keep log files.

Virtually all IRC clients give you the option to log your
chat to one or more files. This is extremely useful if you
need to check back on something that was said last week or
even longer ago. Keeping log files also lets you produce
interesting statistics about your IRC channels, such as those
produced by the Perl IRC Statistics
Generator.

Paul Mutton
is the author of the PircBot IRC framework
and several other Java programs that can be found on
his web site.